Spansion to Launch HyperBus I/F for Automotive

TOKYO — Spansion Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.) has developed a new bus Interface called HyberBus, targeting embedded systems, such as automotive instrument clusters, that demand “instant-on” and an “interactive graphical user interface.” The company claims its proprietary interface offers low latency, high read throughput, and low pin-count.

The HyperBus interface is available for licensing from Spansion.

Spansion also announced that it will become the first flash memory chip vendor to launch HyperFlash NOR memory devices that take advantage of the new interface.

Claiming that the new device is “the world’s fastest” NOR flash memory, Spansion noted that its read throughput is up to 333 megabytes per second -- more than five times faster than an ordinary Quad SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface) flash currently available. Spansion has also kept the pin number of HyperFlash NOR memory devices to 12, one-third the number in Parallel NOR flash.

The initial read access time is 96 nanoseconds.

With this increased performance at a minimum pin count, Hironaga Ino, Spansion’s senior director, responsible for NOR product line, described HyperFlash as a new device that “combines the best of both worlds of Parallel and SPI NOR flash.”

Spansion’s announcement of “HyperBus interface” for embedded systems and “HyperFlash” for NOR memory sets the tone for Spansion’s new business strategy. After the acquisition of Fujitsu Semiconductor’s MCU and analog businesses last summer, Spansion is no longer just a memory chip vendor. Rather, it portrays itself an “embedded systems solution” company.

The new interface consists of an 8-pin address/data bus, a differential clock (2 signals), one Chip Select and a Read Data Strobe for the controller, reducing the overall cost of the system.

Despite an IP license necessary for the use of HyperBus, Spansion is confident that the new interface will be designed into a variety of products including SoCs, MCUs, memories and peripherals. Spansion’s Ino said at a press conference, “More than two leading SoC vendors are already implementing the new HyperBus Interface on their chips.”

In addition, Freescale is rolling out a number of HyperBus-based MCUs in the near future. Freescale has worked with Spansion to develop the new interface, said Ray Cornyn, vice president of product management for Freescale's automotive microcontrollers business.

Spansion will release engineering samples of the HyperFlash NOR memory device in the second quarter this year, according to Ino. The launch of production samples is slated for the third quarter. Spansion is manufacturing the chip, based on a 65-nm process technology, at the company’s fab in Austin, Texas.

Why a new bus interface? For many embedded system OEMs, the most attractive feature in Spansion’s HyperBus Interface is that it allows for “much faster boot time, direct execute-in-place (XIP) from flash, reducing the amount of RAM needed,” explained Spansion.

I have no keyboard with which to see what software the autombile dashboard is loading. On my computer, CTL-ALT-DEL doesn't display loaded programs but the Task Manager does. While there may be no unexpected programs in the "Applications Tab", the "Processes" tab reflects a tremendous number of threads (most of which are system processes that I don't have control over) which seem to multiply even when all the applications are shut down. Periodic reboots seem to be necessary to flush them out and free up processor resources.

Before you do anything on your just booted up computer, do a control+alternate+delete instruction and see how many programs have booted up. As long as you and Microsoft have instructed all there programs to startup ...

I think the solution lies in not booting up the cluster panel after the ignition key is turned on , but keep it in sleep mode while the engine is not running so that it can wake up instantly as sson as the ignition key is detected.

This should be possible with the very low power drwn by the MCU from the Car battery isnt it?

The last car that I rented on a business trip had an instrument cluster that booted like a computer complete with a musical chime, a startup screen, and finally the data of interest. It also had a shutdown sequence complete with graphics and another musical chime.

Ino's question: "What if you turned on the ignition of a new car, and your instrument clusters don't show up instantaneously?" is a reality and it isn't nice. My laptop computer takes 5 minutes to boot up. How long will car instrument clusters take to boot up before consumers complain?

In my opinion, it is the variety of applications that Spanision is offering which will distinguish these solutions if anything....automotive is great but when you can get into other things as well, that's where the real oppotunity lies.

I just finished designing a big (high end) digital cluster with a Fujitsu SoC, 128MB of parallel NOR for the OS and main app and a big NAND flash for data. XIP in this context is still too slow (I have very fast RAM).

Boot time is a real big issue for this application, it's good that Spansion (and Fujitsu) found a solution that looks efficient in term of performance and price.

On a smaller project based on a Renesas chip we use quad SPI with a nice thoughput, I think it will remains the main opponent of hyperbus: it's cheap and will get faster with time.

XIP will save a little bit of RAM, it's also good to have, but I think it will still be too expensive for the smartphone market.

@Junko: considering that NAND using leading edge processes, while This uses 62nm which is quite old for flash, and the small size of those chips , i would say this doesn't pose a threat to NAND in smartphones.